It’s back! The 555 timer contest wants to see you do something cool with the 555 timer chip. At stake is the adulation of electronics geeks everywhere. Three top winners will be awarded a $150 shopping spree in the Digi-Key warehouse thanks to Digi-Key’s generous sponsorship of this contest.
Do you ever sit around thinking of ways to repurpose things in your house? Well [BevCanTech] found a way to recycle some of his empty beverage cans by turning them into homemade wire.
The premise is simple. He cut 2 mm thick strips of wire from the beverage can along its circumference, creating a thin, long “wire” spool. He sanded the ends of each strip to crimp pieces of his homemade wire together. He found he could get about four meters from a standard-sized beverage can, probably roughly 12 oz, as he unraveled the can. He then used crimp connectors to connect his homemade wires to the battery terminals and also to the end of a flashlight. He used a red cap from another can as a pseudo light diffuser and lampshade, creating a pretty cool, almost lava lamp-like glow.
Maybe the meat of this project won’t be as filling as your Thanksgiving meal, but hopefully, it can serve as a bit of inspiration for your next freeform circuit design. Though you’ll probably want to smooth those sharp edges along your homemade wire.
Engineering is all about making a design that conforms to a set of requirements. Usually those are boring things like cost, power consumption, volume, mass or compatibility with existing systems. But sometimes, you have to design something with restrictions you might have never considered. [Devon Bray] was tasked with designing a system that could dispense single drops of water, while making absolutely no noise. [Devon]’s blog describes in detail the process of making The Silent Dripper, which was needed for an art installation called The Tender Interval by [Sara Dittrich].
The design process started with picking a proper pump. Centrifugal pumps can be very quiet due to their smooth, continuous motion, but are not suitable for moving small quantities of liquid. Peristaltic pumps on the other hand can generate single drops of liquid very accurately, but their gripping-and-squeezing motion creates far more sound. [Devon] still went for the latter type, and eventually discovered that filling up the pumping mechanism with lithium grease made it quiet enough for his purpose.
The pump was then mounted on a 3D-printed bracket that also contained the water feeding tube and electrical connections to the outside world. The tubing was fastened with zip ties to stop it from moving when the pump was running, and the pump itself was isolated from the bracket with rubber dampening mounts.
Another trick to silence the pump was the motor driver circuit: standard PWM drivers often cause audible whine from the motor coils because of their abrupt switching, so [Devon] went for a Trinamic SilentStepStick that regulates the current much more smoothly. The end result is a water dripper that makes less noise than a piece of tissue paper being crumpled, as you can observe in the video (embedded below) which also demonstrates the complete art installation.
We really like the mechanical design of the Dripper; as far as we’re concerned it would merit a spot in a gallery on its own. It would not be the first water dripping art project either; we’ve already seen a sculpture that apparently suspends droplets in mid-air. Continue reading “The Silent Dripper Dispenses Water Without Making Any Sound”
Here at Hackaday, we love a good clock project. And if it’s an artistically executed freeform sculpture, even better. But tell us that it’s also a new spin on a classic project from two decades ago, and we’re over the moon for it. Case in point: [Paul Gallagher’s] beautiful recreation of an LED clock riffing on one originally made as a weekend project in early 2000.
Wait, wait. Hold up.
*Ted unclips the microphone from his lapel and stands up from his chair*
OK, dear reader, if you’ll allow me, we’re going to do this one a little differently. Normally I’m supposed to write in the voice of Hackaday, but this project has personal meaning for me, so I’d like to break the rules a bit. You see, the original clock project was mine — one I did over a weekend a long time ago, as evidenced by the “2/13/2000” date on the PCB — and I was quite honored that [Paul] would choose my project as inspiration.
When, on the 20th anniversary of creating this clock, I posted a Twitter thread to commemorate the event, [Paul] picked up the ball and ran with it. You can see the original Twitter thread here. Pictures of the home-etched single-sided board were all he needed to reverse-engineer the relatively simple design, and then re-create it with style.
The design uses a PIC16F84 microcontroller. This was one of the first microcontrollers to really become popular with hobbyists, the key features being the serial programming algorithm which allowed easy homebrew programmers, and the FLASH memory. If I recall correctly, my original programmer ran off a PC’s parallel port. I probably have it in a box somewhere. Each of the 12 LEDs is driven through a separate resistor from individual GPIO lines, while a 32.768 kHz crystal serves as the timebase. Finally, two buttons allow you to set the hours and minutes.
How do you represent three separate hands on such a display? In this case, each hand blinks at a different rate. The hour LED is solid, and the second LED blinks faster than the minute one. You can check it out in [Paul’s] video after the break, and admire the beautiful simplicity of his layout.
Since he was able to re-create the circuit exactly, [Paul] was able to drop-in the original assembly code that runs the clock. True-to-form, Microchip still manufactures the PIC16F84, and their latest tools have no problem with such legacy code — it just works.
Continue reading “Beautiful Free-Form LED Clock Recreates 20-Year-Old Weekend Project”
Mandalas are meditative objects that mean many things to myriad religions. Psychologist Carl Jung equated them with the concept of the Self as a whole, and put forth the notion that an urge to create mandalas signifies a period of intense personal growth.
[Sander van de Bor] took up the mandala challenge at the beginning of 2020 and decided to create several of them in free-form electronic style. If you’re looking for a healthy new way to deal, [Sander] has step-by-step instructions for making your own light-up tree of life by wrangling a wad of wires into a trunk and branches. Big bonus if you already find soldering to be soothing.
[Sander] starts by forming a circle from brass rod. This is the base for the rest of the build and will tie all the LED grounds together. The tree is twisted from a cluster of enameled copper wires that are eventually soldered together to distribute power from a coin cell out to the six SMT LEDs.
You could argue that the tree should be ground because it’s rooted to Earth, but you could also argue that the circle should be ground because the circle of life is a grounding force. Something to think about while you design and build your own, eh?
If electronic sculpture becomes your new thing, explore all the angles with the master manipulator, [Mohit Bhoite].
Digital electronics are all well and good, but it’s hard to ignore the organic, living qualities of the analog realm. It’s these circuits that Kelly Heaton spends her time with, building artistic creations that meld the fine arts with classic analog hardware to speak to the relationship between electronics and nature. During her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, Kelly shared the story of her journey toward what she calls Electronic Naturalism, and what the future might bring.
Kelly got her start like many in the maker scene. Hers was a journey that began by taking things apart, with the original Furby being a particular inspiration. After understanding the makeup of the device, she began to experiment, leading to the creation of the Reflection Loop sculpture in 2001, with the engineering assistance of Steven Grey. Featuring 400 reprogrammed Furbys, the device was just the beginning of Kelly’s artistic experimentation. With an interest in electronics that mimicked life, Kelly then moved on to the Tickle Me Elmo. Live Pelt (2003) put 64 of the shaking Muppets into a wearable coat, that no doubt became unnerving to wear for extended periods.
Analog electronics parallel living organisms while programmable logic merely simulates life.
—Forrest Mims
Wanting to create art with a strong relationship to organic processes, Kelly focused on working with discrete components and analog circuitry. Basic building blocks such as the astable multivibrator became key tools that were used in different combinations to produce the desired effects. Through chaining several oscillators together, along with analog sequencers, circuits could be created that mimicked the sound of crickets in a backyard, or a Carolina wren singing in a tree.
Continue reading “Kelly Heaton’s Artwork Blurs The Line Between Traditional And Electronic”
[Paczkaexpress]’s RGB tree is a mix of clever building techniques and artistic form that come together into quite a beautiful sculpture.
The branches of his tree are made from strands of enameled copper wire capped with an RGB LED and terminated in a female header. The separate wires are all wound and sculpted into the form of a tree. The wire is covered in a very thin layer of plastic, which we highly recommend observing under a microscope, that allow it to maintain a uniform and reflective copper color without shorting, adding to the effect.
The part we found an especially pleasing mix of form and function was how the “roots” of the tree clicked home in the PCB base. The PCB holds the STM32, power components, and an LED Driver. It doesn’t hide how the magic works, and the tree really does get its nutrients from the soil it’s planted in. This would be a fun kit to build. Very clever and you can see the final effect after the break.
